Category: mystery

Book Review, mystery

The Maid by Nita Prose ~ Book Review

Morgan

Ballantine Books
Mystery
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

The Maid has one of the most interesting narrators I’ve ever encountered. Prose does an insanely good job at getting readers inside the head of Molly the maid, who has difficulty socializing and understanding the intentions and true meanings of other people’s words. The way she is written helps the reader to perfectly understand the way that Molly misinterprets things and really made me empathize with her.

When Molly finds one of the guests at the hotel she cleans dead, she is taken in for questioning by the police and quickly becomes a person of interest. Molly interacts with both colleagues and guests at the hotel, and filtered through the lens of Molly, the reader learns there’s something deeply sinister happening at the hotel.

This was definitely a slow burn with a focus on characters rather than action, but the settings and relationships were described in such intricate detail that the story never felt boring.

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Book Review, Fiction, mystery, thriller

The Hunting Wives by May Cobb ~ Book Review

Morgan

Berkley
Thriller
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5

There was a lot going on in The Hunting Wives. Sophie and her husband and son have recently moved to a small town in Texas from Chicago. Sophie quickly becomes bored with her everyday routine at home and catches sight of a group of glamorous and mysterious moms who she decides to attempt to befriend. Chief among them is Margot Banks, who Sophie is enamored by.

The closer Sophie becomes to the group of women, the more secrets she unearths about the group. First of all, they love shooting guns together, often accompanied by excessive drinking. From there, the secrets just get darker and more twisted.

I had no idea what to expect from these women from page to page and I was just as intrigued as Sophie. That being said, some of the women’s actions are pretty disturbing (think sleeping with each other’s sons) and the ending didn’t give me the shocking twist I always hope for from a thriller. That being said, I always love the glamor + scandalous secrets trope and this book did not disappoint in that sense.

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Book Review, Fiction, mystery, thriller

The Younger Wife by Sally Hepworth ~ Book Review

Morgan

St. Martin’s Press
Mystery
Release Date: October 26, 2021
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

Heather meets Stephen when she’s hired as an interior decorator for his wife, who has dementia. As her condition deteriorates and she is moved to a care facility, Heather and Stephen soon find themselves romantically involved. Stephen’s two grown daughters Tully and Rachel are shocked when Stephen announces his engagement to Heather, who’s younger than them.

Tully, Rachel, and Heather all narrate the story and have really rich backstories. That being said, the issues they have dealt with including eating disorders, rape, and kleptomania seemed like they were included as personality traits and were glossed over. The seriousness of these issues did not feel addressed enough to me. Instead, they were used over and over for descriptors of the women.

The book includes flashes to a tragedy occurring at Stephen and Heather’s wedding, narrated by an unknown fourth narrator. I enjoyed the way this built suspense and how the rest of the threads of the story all lead to that point.

I was surprised that there wasn’t a twist at the end of this book. To me, it didn’t feel like much of a thriller since what was going on was pretty much explained to us early on. This felt much more character-driven to me than a true thriller. That being said, I did think it was an interesting character exploration, and I liked reading about the narrators and Stephen’s influence on their lives.

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Buy The Younger Wife at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction, mystery

The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James ~ Book Review

Morgan

Genre: Mystery
Berkley
Release Date: March 15, 2022
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

After suffering her own abduction as a child, Shea Collins has turned to true crime blogging, throwing herself in head first following her divorce. Her latest focus is an interview with the elusive Beth Greer, a local woman who was acquitted after being held as a suspect in the murder of two men. Known as the ‘Lady Killer’ the murders have since gone unsolved for decades.

The narrative is split between Beth and Shea’s perspectives and they both bring the reader incrementally closer and closer to identifying the Lady Killer. The story also brings in elements of the paranormal, which I was not expecting. The ghost-y aspect was veryy creepy and  kept me from reading this too late at night. I’m generally not really a fan of this kind of mystery with paranormal activity, so this definitely took away from my enjoyment of the story.

Shea’s character was really compelling and I liked how her past experiences were used to inform her present actions. I felt like Beth wasn’t explored in as much depth and I had some trouble following her logic.

For whatever reason, I just wasn’t really gripped by this mystery. I didn’t feel like suspending reality to wholly embrace the paranormal plotline which made me care less about the ultimate ending. I had high hopes for this story, but ended up disappointed.

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Book Review, Fiction, mystery

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley ~ Book Review

Morgan

William Morrow
Mystery
Release Date: February 22, 2022
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

I love a thriller with a creepy, atmospheric, anthropomorphic setting. When Jess arrives to visit her brother Ben at his new apartment, that’s exactly what she finds in his building. What she doesn’t find is Ben. Jess begins to question the other residents, trying to ascertain what could have happened between her last phone message from Ben and his disappearance.

There were a lot of characters, each of whom narrated different chapters, and it was hard for me to keep track of them all. Getting so many points of view also made the story move really slowly, since we saw how every character perceived the same events.

I will say that the sinister activities at the heart of this story were very unique compared to the numerous other thrillers I’ve read, but I would definitely classify this as more of a ‘mystery’ than a thriller (there’s a very distinct difference in my mind between the two).

The setting and character motivations of The Paris Apartment were interesting, but I wished things moved faster.

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Book Review, mystery, Romance

Hopeless by Colleen Hoover ~ Book Review

Morgan

Atria Books
YA Romance
Release Date: December 17, 2012
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

Sky has begged her mom to let her stop home-schooling for years. When she finally caves, Sky finds herself preparing to go to public high school for the first time just as her best friend is leaving for a semester overseas. I loved how resilient Sky was in the face of this change and the quirky relationship she had with her best friend/neighbor.

When Sky is noticed by Dean Holder, of the bad boy reputation, she struggles to understand how the boy she’s getting to know could be so at odds with the rumors swirling around him.

I loved the depiction of high school and the friendships Sky forms. Hoover does an incredible job of capturing the mindset and the experiences of a teenager. I didn’t realize this book was YA when I picked it up, and I definitely think some of the extreme overreactions that I had trouble with were just a product of the genre.

I felt the chemistry between Dean and Sky right away, but I also was pleasantly surprised that there was a vein of mystery running through the romance. I had no idea what the connections could be between all the characters and I couldn’t read fast enough to figure everything out.

This book has some dark and very disturbing themes that I was not prepared for, but the way that Sky’s past tied everything together made for a thought-provoking and intense story.

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Buy Hopeless at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, mystery, thriller

Insomnia by Sarah Pinborough ~ Book Review

Morgan

William Morrow & Company (Thank you to the publisher for my copy!)
Genre: Thriller
Release Date: April 12, 2022
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

As Emma approaches her fortieth birthday, she becomes increasingly paranoid that it will trigger a psychotic break like it did for her mother. The changes begin with insomnia, and as Emma paces around her house unable to sleep, she increasingly draws parallels between her actions and those she remembers of her mother just before things went downhill and Emma and her sister had to be put into foster care.

I knew there must be more going on than Emma really just losing touch with reality as she got closer to her fortieth birthday, but I had no idea what was at play. What I loved about the big twist in this book is that there were hints along the way that someone could have noticed, but I totally glossed over. I think it’s so cool when a thriller is able to shock me, but the ending wasn’t so outlandish that it came out of nowhere.

There was an element of this book that definitely required a suspension of reality, which I was not expecting, but I found it to be an incredibly interesting layer to the story that seemed like a fresh take on this kind of a thriller.

My one negative comment is that there were certain details of the story that were repeated over and over again, but I was mostly able to look past this because of the intrigue to figure out what was going on.

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Book Review, mystery, thriller

Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins ~ Book Review

Morgan

St. Martin’s Press
Thriller
Release Date: January 4, 2022
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

Lux and her boyfriend Nico are living in Hawaii trying to save up enough money to repair his boat, The Susannah. When Brittany and Amma offer Nico a generous sum to take them to remote Meroe island, Lux is excited to join their adventure. When the group arrives, they find that there’s a couple already there, the glamorous and friendly Jake and Eliza. Meroe island has a dark history and although the group of strangers hits it off initially, the sudden appearance of another visitor throws things off balance.

Lux followed Nico to Hawaii after only knowing each other for a short time, and more she begins to question the motives of everyone around her, the less she realizes she really knows about him.

The flashbacks we receive about Amma and Brittany’s history makes it clear that there is more to their friendship than meets the eye, and more to their trip to Meroe than they are letting on.

I truly trusted no one in this story, and the setting of an empty tropical island was the perfect mix of picturesque paradise and isolated nightmare. I couldn’t read fast enough through most of this book, waiting for all the pieces to come together.

This was a five star book for me until the end. There was a plot twist that seemed to leave a huge gaping hole in the plot that I could not find a way to see past. Ultimately, the way everything was explained seemed unbelievable to me and the ending left me deeply unsatisfied.

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Book Review, Fiction, mystery, thriller

The Shadow House by Anna Downes ~ Book Review

Morgan

Minotaur Books
Mystery
Release Date: April 5, 2022 (Thank you to NetGalley for my copy!)
My Rating: 🍪🍪

The Shadow House follows Alex as she and her two children move into a new community called Pine Ridge. It’s clear that Alex is running from something as she tries to placate her teenage son about the necessity of another move.

Upon their arrival, Alex finds a box on their doorstep with a dead bird in it. Several days later, a similar box with a disturbing doll arrives. As Alex learns more about the land the community was built on, she begins to worry that there may be something sinister afoot.

I was expecting so much more out of this book. All along, I was waiting for a big reveal about Alex’s traumatic past and a big reveal about what was happening at Pine Ridge. I got neither. There was so much build up and suspense and it fell totally flat for me. There were random side plots of Alex getting to know the other residents, which I expected to all tie together, but they seemed to just be tangents that were ultimately hard to keep track of.

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Book Review, Fiction, mystery, thriller

I’ll Be You by Janelle Brown ~ Book Review

Morgan

Random House
Thriller
Release Date: April 26, 2022
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪.5

Janelle Brown has a unique skill for creating characters with detailed backstories and layers that make them believable and deeply intriguing. Sam and Elli, the twin main characters of  I’ll Be You are no exception. Once childhood actresses, Sam is single and now struggles with addiction while Elli is married with her own floral business. That is, until one day when she mysteriously disappears to a retreat and stops responding to all communication. As Sam begins to worry about her sister, whom she’s been estranged from for years, she realizes that Elli’s happy life may be a mere façade.

Brown shows the progression of the sisters and their bond as they are discovered, become famous, and first learn to switch places. These flashbacks add such a richness to their present-day story and helped me understand their motivations.

I didn’t expect the cult aspect of this book going into it, but I found it especially fascinating, particularly the introspection into the members and how they ended up where they did.

This wasn’t a thriller in the traditional sense, and definitely was a little slower moving, but it kept me glued to the pages trying to guess how everything fit together and how the sisters would end up at the end of it all.

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